STIYA?Personal freedoms are being curtailed ...in evidence everywhere .... it's usually a STIYA from me
I<snip> PS I am NOT a heavy meat user. I am a user of meat and dairy products, and I also use vegetables.
STIYA?
You are close when you say more plants. It is simple biochemistry that carbohydrates (or hydrocarbons as it were) decay to give off either CO2 if there is oxygen around to combine with, or methane in anaerobic conditions. This is a fact of life and death. Cows do not manufacture methane, they convert food into methane just as effectively as your local landfill would do with it. Matter is not being miraculously created by the cows. Each plant when born will give off a certain amount of GHG when it dies, and in the case of trees also when they are mature. So stop planting crops if you want to reduce GHG. Either that or stop burning fossil fuels which was natures way of capturing carbon in the early days where the atmosphere was methane heavy from volcanic activity. That is what coal and oil and natural gas came from. Plant matter that died millions of years ago. So what we need to do is find a mechanism like photosynthesis and burial that can lock the GHG we burn off, and create new fossil fuels. Cows are just a temporary sideshow along the way but their dung and trampling actions help to bury plant matter in the soil to replenish it. A field of cow pasture sequesters more GHG than a field of corn or wheat.If the reason for reducing consumption of meat is really about the animals farting methane, will not humans produce more methane this way if we eat more plants ?
Where's the fertilizer going to come from if there are no farm animals?I agree.
However, the cattle that graze here in my province eat the grass where nothing else grows. Not beans, vegetables or even trees.
I fail to see how trucking vegetables from other regions is better for the environment.
We have to eat. Soy beans and avocados with all the fertilizer and water they use for growing and fuel for transportation are not better in preventing climate change. The science is flawed.
Fossil fuels, other sources of amonia, potash mines, guano deposits. municipal food recycling sites. politicians promises? cess pit emptying as we do now? Plenty of it around, Industrially via Haber -Bosch process but also by adopting crop rotation using nitrogen rich plant material such as clover, borage, or rape.Where's the fertilizer going to come from if there are no farm animals?
Most of which would require a fair bit of energy extracting, processing and transporting it. With no spin-off benefits of meat, wool, dairy, leather etc. The low-tech sustainable option seems to me to use animals rather as we have always been doing up to this point.Fossil fuels, other sources of amonia, potash mines, guano deposits. municipal food recycling sites. politicians promises? cess pit emptying as we do now? Plenty of it around, Industrially via Haber -Bosch process but also by adopting crop rotation using nitrogen rich plant material such as clover, borage, or rape.
What they do eat in their animal feed is Soy husks for the fibre. Normally these husks are discarded into landfill or burnt because they are an unwanted bi-product of human food production such as TVP and Tofu and Tempeh etc. The cows do mankind a service here, expecially the ones in the fields next to the Beyond Meat factories.Much is said about cattle eating soy. They dont. They are ruminants, as are sheep, so they cant digest it.
Big pharma or mining volcanic outcrops - trust 'em? NAH.Where's the fertilizer going to come from if there are no farm animals?
How do you stop the populace drinking their cars dry? Actually, Brazil is leading the way with ethanol producing crops as a government initiative, but the Amazon rainforest is suffering as a consequence. Officially according to environmentalists it is due to cow pasture and soya for feeding cows on but that is bunkum in Brazil. As said, cows die from eating soya, and most of the logging slash and burn is for biomass. Also for palm oil which is so essential in cosmetics. These two never get mentioned now do they?I always thought that the way forward in everyday transport was alcohol based fuels, as they can be made anywhere, use technology similar to the engines already in use, and there are tons of raw materials around which it would be advantageous to use for something which would benefit the planet.
The electric car is expensive in many ways - not just to buy, and to treat the pedestrians mown down by the almost silent vehicles which have startled me in supermarket car parks. Making and disposing of the batteries will be problematic, sooner or later.
An alcohol based fuel would be ideal for small runabouts and motor cycles, even assisted bicycles - there were tiny motors which could be added to ordinary bicycles - anyone remember them? Growing crops for fuel, and grazing animals on the aftermath would be really sensible, particularly as temperatures in winter mean that things don't stop growing like they used to do, nor are they covered in snow.